Freebie Friday: e-Books

So we come to another week and another Freebie Friday… again with the painfully unoriginal title that I frankly don’t care about. Happy March, by the way, and 15 days until one of my favorite holidays, St. Patrick’s Day.

Friday was a good day to choose for this, in light of the one Freebee that I have to share with everyone today. But I’ll get to that in a minute.

Let’s talk about e-Readers.

I received a Nook Color for my birthday last year and, like many, was baffled by Barnes and Noble’s latest release: the Nook Tablet. The differences? Oh, there are some, aside from the name, but you wouldn’t know it to look at it. The Nook Tablet looks EXACTLY like the Nook Color. What differentiates it is the HD display and processor… whoopie. B&N is now touting an 8GB version of the Nook Tablet, and I am assuming that this is an upgrade on the built-in flash memory because both still have expandable memory; technically, you can go up to 64 Gb of memory, if you wanted to, by just buying a new microSD card and without having to pay hundreds more for it to be built-in… *cough*like the iPad.*cough*

Now, because we all love free things, here’s one thing that I generally fail to remember on Fridays and shouldn’t: B&N has a blog aptly titled The Nook Blog where, every Friday, a free Nook book is featured. No, they are not awful books that people create and upload to the Nook store (and I’ve come across many.) Most of the books they feature are by actual authors who actually have writing careers and aren’t amateurs. Go there to see what the free book of the day is and read the synopsis, then hop on B&N’s website or your Nook to search for the author and download the free book. Yes, there is some work involved, but you get a free book out of it that might normally cost $1.99 and up to $12.99 or more.

From your Nook device, you can also check out discounted e-Books featured that day. Go to the Shop screen and select the area where they pick items for you based on your browsing history. Scroll over and it is one of the feature graphics.

If you don’t have a Nook, you can still benefit by these free downloads. The Nook app can be downloaded for free to numerous devices: your PC or laptop, iPad, iPhone, Android phone, etc. From there, you can use it to access your Nook library, like you would from any Nook device.

Or you can buy a Nook, and I highly recommend it. I love my Nook Color, and I frankly don’t plan to upgrade until it either, a. dies or b. the next best thing comes out that isn’t the current Nook Tablet. Not that I have anything against a Nook Tablet, I just don’t see the incentive to upgrade right now. As a FYI, the Nook Color is currently $169, the Nook Tablet (8 Gb) is $199 and the Nook Simple Touch is $99.

Kindle users, there are free e-Books for you, too… I just don’t know where to find them because I don’t use the Kindle! Ok, that was mean. I did some investigating.

To find some free Kindle books, try searching some of the Amazon lists that users come up with, like this one. Like the Nook PC app, Amazon also offers a Kindle for PC app, and I imagine that it works in the same way, allowing you to access whatever you would normally access on your Kindle from your PC. Apps for other devices are also available.

No matter what device you have, free classic titles are always available to download on Project Gutenberg. There are currently over 38,000 of them.

Now that you got it these books for free and saved all that cash… if by any chance you feel like buying some books, specifically ones that are educational, check out the e-Book selection from Princeton University Press. I worked for them for a semester as an unpaid volunteer/intern. Great organization.